Company 605 performs Loop, Lull at Scotiabank Dance Centre, Jan. 21–22, and 28–29 as part of this year’s PuSh International Festival of Performing Arts. For more information visit are on sale at pushfestival.ca.
Whether it’s matter in motion or dancers in flight, the one constant is nothing ever stays the same.
When folk singer Pete Seeger and later the Byrds, borrowing from the Book of Ecclesiastes, opined in song that there was “A time to build up, a time to break down, a time to dance, a time to mourn” they were acknowledging a universal truth of which no one is exempt: that things change, they transform. Nothing stays the same forever.
In Loop, Lull, a hypnotic new dance piece from Vancouver-based Company 605, five dancers will explore the spectre of change along with the gradualness and fragility in which that transformation occurs.
“We’re exploring these concepts through looping movement, so movement that is very repetitious in nature and that cycles around so that there’s no end and no beginning but something keeps happening over and over again,” says Lisa Gelley, co-artistic director and performer with Company 605.
As dancers create their own improvised gestures and loops of motion, manipulating the lighting, music and ambient sounds around them, the audience might be lulled by the repetitious nature, explains Gelley. But much like life itself – which can feel consistent and monotonous until one day it doesn’t – the movements of the dancers will gradually come to sync up and shift as increasingly complex feats of physical performance are attempted.
“In this repetition, that’s when the change starts to be there,” says Gelley. “Intentionally come in or accidentally come in, but it’s recorded and it’s reacted to every single time something new appears.”
Company 605 first emerged as a collective more than 10 years ago. Gelley, who has served as one of the co-artistic directors since its inception, says the company strives to fuse contemporary and urban dance with rigorous physicality and abundant group collaboration.
“It’s a very collaborative piece because although the two co-directors, Josh Martin and myself, bring the proposition and the ideas and we direct the room, they’re generating all the movements for themselves,” says Gelley.
In creating Loop, Lull, the company strove to build upon dance ideas first explored in a previous production, 2016’s Vital Few, which included segments of looping.
“We kind of felt like we just scratched the surface of the concept of movement looping and we wanted to dig deeper into what that could be if we just looked at looping as a sole movement practice for a piece,” says Gelley.
With the style of dance selected for Company 605’s next project, the group begun developing themes that fit in with what they were doing. The theme of change was chosen as an appropriate way to frame the narrative, explains Gelley.
In creating Loop, Lull, the company strove to build upon dance ideas first explored in a previous production, 2016’s Vital Few, which included segments of looping.
“The premise is a practice we’ve developed as a company and as a group of people who are working on ideas around change – how to let change in, how to adapt to change, how to go through moments of instability and resurface with something new,” she says. “It feels like the most authentic way to address what we’re asking.”
Gelley was raised in Deep Cove, graduating from Seycove Secondary in 2000. She started dancing at five, learning her early steps in the form at North Shore Academy of Dancing before attending Spotlight Dance Centre in Burnaby upon entering high school.
“When I became a teenager I realized how connected I was to dance. More than recreation, it was a part of my artistic expression,” she says. “It seemed to be quite instinctual as a language for me to incorporate into my life.”
Prior to joining Company 605, Gelley worked mainly as an independent dance artist, including a tenure with Aeriosa, a dance company that melds artistic performance with environment and adventure.
Part of Gelley’s time with Aeriosa included learning about “vertical contemporary dance in rocking climbing systems,” which meant “you could be on the side of a building or the side of the mountain,” performing a dance, she says. “I joined the company with no experience rock climbing at all.”
Loop, Lull won’t necessarily feature dancers suspended in midair atop a mountainside, but Gelley’s bringing her own sense of demanding physicality to the production, with performers tasked with building layer upon layer of complex looping motions in an improvised setting.
There’s always the risk that things won’t work out, she says about the piece’s spontaneous quality, before adding that her group of professional dancers are adept at, somehow, always pulling it off.
Asked what she hopes audiences will come away with after seeing the piece, she hopes they can appreciate the sheer technicality of the dance, one that’s derived not from a polished performance, but dancers’ ability to change, transform and adapt moment to moment.
“This work that the dancers are doing could potentially be a more universal concept of what it means to be working on something in your life or in the world.”
